capitalism shifted again mostly toward the analysis of the state and patterns of state intervention
(Evans 1995; Schneider 1999; Bresser-Pereira 1996).
These successive literatures highlighted major aspects of capitalism in Latin America but
also left important gaps. First, they had little to say about distinctive forms of corporate
governance in domestic firms. We know a good deal about the political activities of domestic
business, and its relations with government and MNCs, but much less about how local capitalists
built and organized their firms.
3
Second, and similarly, the large literature on organized labor
illuminates more of its role in politics than in collective bargaining and firm-level intermediation.
Lastly, the study of worker skills, education, and training has been largely left to a small group of
policy experts, and the small literature on skills is rarely incorporated into general discussions of
the performance of Latin American capitalism overall. The ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach
directs attention precisely to these neglected areas.
The ‘varieties’ approach starts with the firm, which in some ways seems to hark back to
the narrow perspective adopted in research on Latin American business in the 1960s. However,
the focus is on the firm and its strategic interactions with its environment, and in Latin America
the international economy and the state dominate this environment. Even from a firm’s-eye view
the state rarely disappears; states mediate many key relations -- with creditors, unions, and MNCs,
for example -- and regulate many markets. Nonetheless, a firm’s-eye view of the world is useful
both as a corrective to other perspectives that either deduce firm behavior or treat it as secondary
and mechanically reactive to other forces. And, in practice, what has emerged in developing
countries in the wake of market-oriented reforms of the 1980s and 1990s is neither state-led nor
market-led development but rather business-led development.
A main goal in the ‘varieties of capitalism’ perspective is to identify complementarities
among institutions. For Hall and Soskice extensive vocational training in “coordinated market
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3
Nothing like the extensive subdiscipline of business history in developed countries exists in
Latin America. What little historical material there is on individual businesses and business people
comes almost exclusively from journalists.
Convention